Object-oriented message-passing in heterogeneous environments

Abstract

Heterogeneous parallel systems integrate machines with different architectural characteristics, such as endianess and word size. To use message-passing in these environments, the data must be translated by the communication layer. Message-passing standards like the Message Passing Interface (MPI) require the user to specify the type of the data sent, such that the communication layer can effect the necessary conversions. We present an object-oriented message-passing library for C++, TPO++, which is capable to communicate in heterogeneous environments. Its functionality includes the MPI 1.2 standard, but it allows the user to communicate any data like objects or Standard Template Library (STL) containers in a type-safe way. It does not require the user to build a type representation explicitly. We compare the performance of heterogeneous TPO++ with Boost.MPI and the C interface of OpenMPI. Our findings are that heterogeneous communication in TPO++ is possible with a very small overhead in latency compared to pure MPI. The performance of TPO++ is considerably better than that of other object-oriented communication libraries. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.